League of Legends is an entirely different game though. It's not technically classified as an MMO or MMORPG. It's a MOBA. Yes, PvP can be a money maker, if that's all you do with a game's multiplayer. COD is successful due to it's mutliplayer (which is mainly PvP). However, when a game is being built for both PvE and PvP multiplayer then one of two things usually happens:

1. PvP gets the shaft in favor of CooP PvE.
2. PvP and PvE exist in the same "zone". Basically Open world PvP. This works better for MMOs as people go to an MMO not only for massive multiplayer gaming, but to experience another world. Structured PvP can't do this. Things like WvW or a full PvP game like EVE achieve this - because your actions affect the world and aren't just a one-off encounter with leaderboards.

Granted this is personal preference, but I think when it comes to MMO games, a large majority of players don't want the GW1 sPvP model. Not because it is bad, but because the market is saturated with games like that already. I already play COD, League of Legends, DOTA2, Battlefield for the structured matches with leaderboards, K/D ratio (doubt GW2 has this), etc. I don't want ANOTHER game like that, even if the gameplay is a bit different. I believe this is how a lot of players feel, they buy GW2, or another MMO, for the world not the PvP. Simply because sPvP Match style Multiplayer is everywhere and a lot of people don't want to play the SAME gametype over and over just with different mechanics.

And yet, GW1 did it really well. Many mane people would suggest that GW1's PvP was the best MMO PvP ever made. And the PvP in GW1 was basically a MOBA.

Yes, they ran in to problems with balance when they introduced new professions and skills - but those things could have been easily remedied in GW2 (and many thought that was part of the reason for making GW2).

So, to say that it couldn't have been done seems a bit silly considering that the same company that made GW1 made GW2 and GW1 did it better than anyone.

Furthermore, the state of PvP in GW2 is so bad that, comparatively speaking, it is a colossal failure.

Also, none of the MOBAs you referenced hold a candle to GW1s PvP, I merely mentioned LoL because I anticipated the common argument that PvP doesn't matter because it isn't a money maker.

Yeah, it should have been level 20, with the entire world (almost) as max level areas. That model was perfected in GW1 and then abandoned for some reason, at the same time as when ANet invented a way to make lots of areas attractive.

as the title asks, do you think the maximum level cap should have been level 20 in guildwars 2?
you'd get to level 20 at the same rate you get to level 20 now. only all maps past level 20 are scaled to fit for level 20s.

i think it would have made a lot of sense, and given a greater sense of "endgame is what you do while you're levelling". it would also fix looting, since you'd have almost a whole world to explore and do DEs in, instead of now orr and dragons.

Before fixing anything, let's quickly identify the core problems with GW2's PvE today. And by "PvE", I mean only the open-world PvE here, not personal story or dungeons.

So, the problems:
- The world is dead. Other than cursed shore, the dragons, and lion's arch, it's largely empty.
- "Dynamic" events are hardly dynamic, as we were led to believe.
- The reward structure is really, really bad. This is actually the main reason for the first problem.

...aaand now how to fix all this, starting with the pre-requisites and moving on to more complex changes:

1. Better event scaling. Currently events don't scale well for large number of players (10+). You just get more mobs in pre-set spawn points that get aoed down just as easily. Anyone who's spent 30 minutes in Cursed Shore knows this. Some improvements were made in this regard compared to a few months ago, but it's very little. Events with more players around need to spawn veterans and champions and add additional spawn points, not just additional mobs. Basically, things that are not negated by AoE.

2. Iterative difficulty scaling for events. Most events never fail. Why not? Because they're too easy. Anet needs to add difficulty scaling that's not dependent on number of players, but based on the number of times the event was successfully completed previously (on top of number-of-players scaling in #1, not instead). Every event stats at difficulty 0 after a server reset. Each time it's completed successfully, the difficulty goes up by 1 point. 1 point of difficulty translates into 1 additional mob per wave, +3% mob health and damage, etc.

So instead of facerolling Shelter's Gate Camp for loot every 10 minutes, one day you might come there and get zerged by veteran spiders. Woah, what happened? Well, see, the last defense barely succeeded and turned the difficulty from 7 to 8. And they had more people than you did, so tough luck. But now that the event failed, the difficulty scale goes down by -3, so next time the event will be at difficulty 5. This system will calibrate itself to the average number of players in an area and add a huge amount of variety to the same events, while the +1/-3 system still ensures it succeeds most of the time. (The scale is hidden, so people don't intentionally avoid scaled-up events.)

3. More events. More, more, more. There are a handful of basic event "templates" in the game and 95% of all events fit in these: defend a point, assault a point, escort an npc, kill a boss, kill mobs until the bar gets to 0 (or 100%). I honestly don't see why anet isn't minting these like crazy. I highly doubt they take a lot of time to make, given that you already have all the components... just need to put the pieces together in a slightly different configuration in a different area. BAM, new event. Reduce the frequency of each individual event to keep the number of concurrent events the same, but increase the variety. I'm not asking here for a brand-new zone with brand-new armored crabs and a ton of scripting to be used one time and then abandoned. This would probably take far less work.

4. Balancing rewards. The base reward for completing an event is pitiful. 1.5 silver, some experience that you don't need at 80, and a bit of karma that's grossly outweighed by the daily jug. (The daily jug was a good idea, but it's just... difficult to outperform it. That's a different subject.) The bulk of the reward comes from the drops and drops from a single champion are much worse than from aoeing waves of mobs for 4 minutes. Most of the time the champion takes more effort too!

The second problem is the disparity between zones. Events in Orr are well-known (so everyone does the easy ones), highly populated and give max rewards for level 80. Events in every other zone are the complete opposite. To balance this:

- Normalize the silver/exp/karma rewards for lvl 80s throughout the world. Seriously, it's a tiny amount of money anyway and getting 1.5s or 0.9s won't really impact anything. All it does is make lower-level events look bad.
- Improve drops from champions. Duh. To avoid causing inflation, do not flat-out make them drop 15 silver, but simply add a chance for each champion to drop zone-specific items. Each zones or a group of zones could have things like unique armor sets and unique weapon skins. There are zone-unique weapon skins in the game currently, such as "Steam" weapons in Charr areas, but they're easily obtainable and thus can't serve as an incentive to go there.
- Also add tokens to champions. For X tokens from champions in Charr lands, you can buy a rare armor skin (that also drops only in this areas), but weapons can only be gotten as a drop. Something like that.

5. Worldwide and zone-wide event notifications. Another very simple addition, but once you've really made events dynamic (points #1 and #2), added more of them (#3), and gave the players a reason to go there (#4), tell people about them! Display all events happening in the zone on the map, with an option to toggle it off, and display MAJOR events happening in other zones on the world map, like Orr temple assaults, dragons, swamp monster in Queensdale, etc. People will see events and flock to them instead of wandering about empty zones alone or farming events in Cursed Shore as a zerg.

Also, display this next point in the corner of the screen (under your personal story) at all times:

6. Daily zones. Now we're getting into more ambitious things. It's time to really create a dynamic world. Each day 1 or 2 zones could become event hubs. Balefire means business today and made a pact with the ogres to attack Ebonhawke! The entire area turns into a warzone. You know, the Charr are really attacking. Basically, turn the area into Cursed Shore + difficulty scaling (#2).

Hearts are disabled (Farmer Joe doesn't really care about shooing away the gryphons from this cabbage when THE CHARR ARE ATTACKING). All regular events that fit the war theme are enabled with a majorly increased frequency (remember, we reduced it in #3 and increased the total number of events). There are additional events active: every outpost gets assaulted on a regular basis and after a successful defense, there are events to march out and take down a champ or recapture a lost outpost. Again, this is all just copy/paste stuff (#3). Optimize the templates and then make more events!

As a bonus, drops of zone-specific rewards are doubled for the day when that area is a warzone.

As a second bonus, if a critical number of events is failed during the day (this could be a rather high threshold), the zone is under Flame Legion's control for next 1-3 days, every waypoint is disabled, you still can't do hearts in it (Farmer Joe is dead, his head is on a spike, and so are the cabbage-loving gryphons), and after these 3 days, the map becomes a warzone for the day again. Same events are running with the aim of recapturing it. This time it can't fail.

7. Live GMs. All of the above would do a good job of making the world appear dynamic, as it was advertised in the beginning, but dedicated game-masters controlling the world would make it REALLY dynamic. Provided there's a good framework for creating events (#3), anet could expand it to create events out of pre-set pieces on the fly. Starcraft's map editor did it in 1999 by allowing you to create custom missions using building blocks already provided with the game, why can't we do it on a live server in 2013? This outpost is getting attacked by X waves, each one consisting of Y mobs for Z minutes. Oh and there's a dragon at the end, which I'm going to personally control and target people with it. Go!

A GM per server or even 1 GM per few servers could further spice up the "daily areas" and add an occasional special event to other places in the world. And once again, I don't mean "occasional" and "special" a la brand-new invisible precursor-dropping crabs that take months of development for one night of lag. No, "special", as in, there will be a unique event somewhere a few times per day that's not part of the game's default package. You know, something new.

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Well, that's pretty much it. A game like this would almost certainly keep me playing for years, paying a sub fee, and buying all the expansions. (Provided those expansions also expanded the above model).

Been playing GS/Staff Guardian since the god damn August, same skills, same utilities, for more than 5 damn months.
You tell me how this is normal?
Swamp weapon? That's BS, I want to change the first 5 skills. I want to be able to run only 2 Attacks - Whirling Wrath and Strike and 8 utilities. Why can't I? That's just ridiculous

Even with the PvX Wikia, each profession had more than 20 different builds for different situations, PvE, PvP. There was no one unique build for everything.

How I describe this? Dumbed down for lazy ass people who don't want to use their brains to put together skills from the skill pool on their skill bar. Balance issues? Bull _! How much Guardian Heals skills (nr 6 slot) are there again? Doesn't matter, everyone uses Signet anyway. They can't even make 4 damn healing skills equally useful.

* leveling...They should've done away with it all together. It's a relic from the old AD&Ds days that really has no business in a computer game. All the math can be done behind the scenes and players can still feel progression without seeing those fancy numbers. Just look at the way GW2 PvE downscaling works, your level is pretty much a non-issue.

In beta weekends I found this charge to severly handicap my ability to solo areas beyond starting areas. They have reduced the cost for both of these at earlier levels so, at launch, I was willing to give it a chance to grow on me. But now that I am lvl 80 it is again too much. And before you WoW players chime in and say how much more it costs in that game for these two usless expenses, I have never played any MMO but Guildwars... and I expect there is a reason for that.

I work for 8 hrs per day so I can have a house and feed my wife and kids. I love my family and enjoy my house. In a fantasy world I would pay my mortgage, put food on the table and then have the rest of my money to use for hobbies, go on vacation, drugs, hookers... whatever I decide to spend it on. But in reality I have to pay taxes, pay for gas to and from work and pay insurance on my car and my house. I also have to pay a monthly charge on natural gas and electricity in addition to what I use (I live in Canada so I can't just cut it off and not use any).

The point is I get far to much reality in real life. I have yet to find a person that says they enjoy these extra burdens placed on us players. Sure there are those that say they are use to it and have learned to manage their funds but as I play this game more, this involuntary spending of my cash is going to be what drives me back to GW1.

I have my share of usless drops and lagged events but I can easily get past those. I Don't understand how other ex-Guildwars players don't rip Anet a new one for putting so much effort into taking the best aspects of all games on the market but failing to bring along one of the greatest things about their own game and, in fact, draging such a negative function into this game simply because all the other games do it.

Paying for travel and repairing armor sucks. If it wasn't for this I would love this game. I hope people don't reply to this with ways around these chagres like the travel to Lion's Arch through the mists trick or easy places to farm where you don't die. I am against ANY charge for travel and armor repair. It really hurts those of us that like to choose what we spend our money on.

What's not to understand? Skills moved around means awkward muscle memory adjustment. Less frequent symbol of wrath means less dps and less combos. And now we only have 1 skill with a 10 second cooldown instead of 2 so it also means more time with boring auto-attacks (if you've not switched to another weapon) than before. The last is really the killer for me. I wouldn't have cared if they nerfed retaliation from symbol of wrath, but at least don't change what was a great (imo) and active skillset. Having those two relatively low cooldown skills made it feel like a nice active weapon in my experience (I guess I should play warrior if I want access to a greatsword with low cooldown skills now .

I usually avoid topics like this, but I'll toss in my 2c. Guardians and Eles were the classes of the masses and sported the highest percentages of players by more than a couple %. That is typically a good indicator that the class is performing better than others early in the learning curve (warrior) or there are aspects of the class which are out of balance. Really, all they did was remove some of the mindlessness from the class.

Shouts are still strong, especially SYG. You just have to pay attention to your/ally's location instead of mindlessly mashing the button and relying on 1200 range.

Healing was too strong in the past. Areanet is making it more and more clear they want people to prevent damage... not heal. How can a Guardian achieve that? Shield of Absorption, Wall of Reflection, Aegis, Banish, Line of Warding, Ring of Warding, Protection buff, Shield of the Avenger, Hammer of Wisdom, Bane Signet, Signet of Justice, Sanctuary. There are so many ways for a Guard to control battle and prevent damage. I won't even look at how much condition removal they have. Condition removal is huge but people are still ignoring it. Anyway, popping 1200 range AoE heal skills was support in its simplest form, and it obviously wasn't what Arenanet wanted.

Yes, they weakened the survivability of the builds that revolved around eating damage and healing through it, but it hasn't hurt the ones based on prevention. I for one like the direction the Guardian and game are headed.

If you love the Guardian, don't jump ship. Look for alternative ways of achieving what you used to accomplish. You have a whole community of players who are willing to help.